This week on the forum

This week has seen a few interesting discussions on the French language forum, which I'd urge you to take a look at if you've not already paid it a visit. Some of my own contributions come in the form of the French Word of the Day category: each day, I'll be posting a word that is "interesting" in some way-- for example because it illustrates a useful basic grammar point, or because it has some interesting history to it. The French slang system verlan also had a mention this week.

Other questions posted by members of the group (of which we now have nearly a hundred and this number is growing every day), hit on a range of topics such as the pronunciation of certain words, or various translation and grammar difficulties that cropped up in certain sentences.

I'd like to take this opportunity to mention a couple of tips on posting. The first is, if it's easy for you to do, please try and put accents on French words and sentences, although I appreciate that on some keyboards/setups, this is cumbersome. Windows users may be interested in the French Linguistics article on how to type accents in Windows-- if you're going to be dealing a lot with French, it is definitely worth finding out how to get the accents. The other tip is simply a reminder that the forums allow you to use formatting such as bold and italic if this makes you post clearer. A convention that I like to use, for example, is to put French words in bold and translations in italics.

Anyway, enjoy the forum, and I look forward to some interesting discussions over the next week!